Greenhouse gas emissions and its driving forces in the transport sector of South Africa

The reliance on energy to power vehicles in the transport sector is solely fossil-based fuels. These are the dominant source of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) posing huge threats to climate change and increasing global warming. To detect the driving forces responsible for GHG emissions in realising its intensity target, the paper examines the national population, economic growth, energy intensity, urbanisation, infrastructural investments, fuel consumption, freight turnover and passenger vehicles on energy related GHGs emissions in the South Africa’s transport sector from 2011 to 2020 by applying an extended Stochastic Impact by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology (STIRPAT) and nonparametric additive regression to assess the main driving forces. The empirical results revealed that increase in population, economic growth, energy intensity, passenger vehicles and freight transport are more liable to cause an increase in GHG emissions. From the estimated elastic coefficient, the study shows that population and economic growth are the most influencing factors to GHGs emitted. Others are also significant but more often dependent on the increasing population and the nation’s economic growth. Hence, for policy recommendations in mitigating GHG emissions the dynamic effects of the influencing factors at varying provinces and periods should be of consideration in mitigating GHG emissions in the transportation sector of South Africa.